I remember watching a conference video featuring Moxie - he was the golden child, and there was an older guy saying "We've been doing cryptography for so long... how do we get paid?"
Sounded very much like a inner circle backroom deal kind of moment.
I can’t imagine many people less interested in $, that could make boatloads of it, than Moxie. Dude would rather weld, help society cryptographically, and enjoy life with friends than be the billionaire founder he obviously could be.
Judging by Mahar's TED talk about the diminished value of truth vs. alignment circulating on twitter, it looks like the Signal Foundation has finally fallen under the influence of the nihilists as well. FOSS doesn't need non-profit orgs, and people in tech aren't equipped to secure them from the people trained to take them over.
Being a non-profit is a huge advantage to Signal as they are not beholden to profits or shareholders. A messaging app that is used by millions worldwide, is a very juicy target for profit making via advertising otherwise. Meredith (Signal president) equates it to a a rampart against tech surveillance gobbling up Signal
> signal is an 501c3 nonprofit and that's a sort of you
know an incorporation of you know in the
US where you you agree not to take
you know profits you get Revenue you can
get Revenue but you're you not for
profit and you have kind of a charitable
aim and that requires that you do
certain transparency protocols so
there's sort of forms we file that show
our finances that also means that we
don't take sort of investment in the
classic venture capitalist sense and
that we cannot be acquire we could be
acquired but you know the executives and
the the board would not get a payout so
if we sold signal for billions of
dollars to say you know Palantir here or
something evil like that um we would
have to reinvest that money in
charitable causes um now why is our
incorporation structure important well
it's actually one of the key barriers or key protections I would say like a
rampart that allows us to keep fully
focused on our mission of providing you
know meaningful private
Communications and in Tech that is you
know particularly important because the
barrier we're protecting against is the
fact that the business model in Tech is
monetizing
surveillance so if we had investors if
we had you know you know limited
partners breathing down our neck if we
had you know shareholders who were sort
of hassling that one old guy on our
board about you know increasing revenues
or growth or this doesn't look too good
the Privacy thing that seems a little
dated we're not getting the kind of
growth we need um we would be pushed to
compromise our privacy Focus because the
money lies in surveillance
There’s older blog posts from Signal explaining the same, but I feel the current Signal team is very well equipped to avoid hostile takeovers.
> "I'm no longer involved at Signal. While I may wish a lot of different things for it, the whole point of the project is that you don't have to trust your communication to anyone."
For adversaries, it's just easier to take over tech companies than good willed folks to build them. Going on, the community should just not trust anything that is centralised. Implementing that well, lack of profit and fatigue are the great challenges.
DHH's "I trust Meta over Signal because a board member at Signal is woke" is utter content-farming clickbaity dishonest discourse for someone of his skill and intelligence (given the guarantees inherent in the Signal protocol and its opensource nature) and his previously stated stance against cancel culture [0]. This quest for influence seems to break people's brains in weird ways.
Her work history is indeed extremely concerning, but you're probably being downvoted because you invented a fake quote. Double quotes means a literal quote, he never said that. You invented it.
Well this is certainly an unexpected and weird announcement. I actually thought Moxie was (the main person behind) Signal. Not giving any details about this feels weird to me. How are we supposed to trust an organization that prides itself to be the beacon of free communication, when they communicate so... cryptically? Does anyone have more information on what happened here? (And what/if any are the current alternatives?)
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."
There is a video of her speaking, which I find hard to translate.
Most recent are a reasonably mundane culture wars stuff but (more interesting to HN) it seems earlier Signal related ones appear to suggesting a degree of alignment with the USA government. The words "spook" and "compromised" are used in different comments.
Edits. From the Signal page:
"She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, where she advises the Secretary of State on technology policy"
which may explain some of it. It reminds me of an odd experience I had with Wikipedia around covid time - I edit a bit and thought you could say covid may have arisen zoonotically like all previous such pandemics or may have come from the nearby lab which was running job ads for bat coronavirus researchers at the time of the outbreak and as an open wiki you could consider both but no - the lab stuff was largely verboten and unmentionable. I guess the above article explains a bit how that happened maybe?
DHH only has strong feelings. Katherine Maher is a great CEO and leader and has been taken out of context in order to isolate her and make her unsupportable by people who claim to not like cancel culture. The whole thing is ridiculous.
lrvick|1 year ago
2. Moxie is paid for being on their board
3. Moxie directs non-profit Signal to integrate MobileCoin
4. MobileCoin offers 50% of their premine for sale.
5. Signal/Mobilecoin news spikes price to $60
6. Moxie steps down as CEO of Signal but remains on board
7. Mobilecoin price today is $0.09
8. Moxie is no longer involved at Signal
This is why we need decentralization.
flooow|1 year ago
That's an interesting interpretation. I read it as 'all cryptocurrencies are scams'.
sdwr|1 year ago
Sounded very much like a inner circle backroom deal kind of moment.
Guess they figured it out!
reducesuffering|1 year ago
motohagiography|1 year ago
dredmorbius|1 year ago
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=r2gsj0EEE3I>
captn3m0|1 year ago
> signal is an 501c3 nonprofit and that's a sort of you know an incorporation of you know in the US where you you agree not to take you know profits you get Revenue you can get Revenue but you're you not for profit and you have kind of a charitable aim and that requires that you do certain transparency protocols so there's sort of forms we file that show our finances that also means that we don't take sort of investment in the classic venture capitalist sense and that we cannot be acquire we could be acquired but you know the executives and the the board would not get a payout so if we sold signal for billions of dollars to say you know Palantir here or something evil like that um we would have to reinvest that money in charitable causes um now why is our incorporation structure important well it's actually one of the key barriers or key protections I would say like a rampart that allows us to keep fully focused on our mission of providing you know meaningful private Communications and in Tech that is you know particularly important because the barrier we're protecting against is the fact that the business model in Tech is monetizing surveillance so if we had investors if we had you know you know limited partners breathing down our neck if we had you know shareholders who were sort of hassling that one old guy on our board about you know increasing revenues or growth or this doesn't look too good the Privacy thing that seems a little dated we're not getting the kind of growth we need um we would be pushed to compromise our privacy Focus because the money lies in surveillance
There’s older blog posts from Signal explaining the same, but I feel the current Signal team is very well equipped to avoid hostile takeovers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIhLQrldq0s
thinkingemote|1 year ago
> "I'm no longer involved at Signal. While I may wish a lot of different things for it, the whole point of the project is that you don't have to trust your communication to anyone."
timeon|1 year ago
anonymousiam|1 year ago
rand846633|1 year ago
zecg|1 year ago
poisonborz|1 year ago
ignoramous|1 year ago
[0] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1283892240314580992
0xy|1 year ago
huslage|1 year ago
querez|1 year ago
tssva|1 year ago
nocobot|1 year ago
vlod|1 year ago
From the tweet:
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."
There is a video of her speaking, which I find hard to translate.
thinkingemote|1 year ago
Most recent are a reasonably mundane culture wars stuff but (more interesting to HN) it seems earlier Signal related ones appear to suggesting a degree of alignment with the USA government. The words "spook" and "compromised" are used in different comments.
Edits. From the Signal page:
"She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, where she advises the Secretary of State on technology policy"
tim333|1 year ago
which may explain some of it. It reminds me of an odd experience I had with Wikipedia around covid time - I edit a bit and thought you could say covid may have arisen zoonotically like all previous such pandemics or may have come from the nearby lab which was running job ads for bat coronavirus researchers at the time of the outbreak and as an open wiki you could consider both but no - the lab stuff was largely verboten and unmentionable. I guess the above article explains a bit how that happened maybe?
sp332|1 year ago
cqqxo4zV46cp|1 year ago
huslage|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]